Posts by diodesign 3533 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Sep 2011
God dammit. I'm in too much of a rush this morning - it's been fixed.
PS: Please use the correction button on articles - the messages go straight to my desk, phone, tablet, shoe, home - rather than relying on me to check every one of the thousands of comments posted a day.
C.
"Virgin also have over utilisation issues in many parts of the country with cable... Why not cover that?"
Please, email us with your problems: either the reporter or to news@thereg. If one person drops us a note, it may just be an end-user cock-up. If 50 hit us up, we know it's a problem.
And this Sky capacity issue was definitely a problem for some.
C.
"I suggest Lewis look there for his kind if he needs new employers"
I doubt it; he's the esteemed editor of this fine organ. And he's made his views clear on the subject of climate here, scroll down (or search) for 'full disclosure'.
"But to wilfully and continuously disparage the scientific method"
Yes! Of course! You're so right! We should just swallow everything we hear! There's only harm to come from questioning everything, testing ideas and challenging data! Let's completely forget that high-level decisions - the consequences of which could be devastating - are being made on the basis of alarmist predictions! It is so obvious that The Reg is completely derailing the entire scientific process, destroying millions - nay, billions - of lives and setting back engineering progress by centuries simply by reporting something you don't want to hear.
"is there a way I can block these ridiculous articles from appearing in my logged in version of the Register?"
No.
C.
"the UK has a body that can fine newspapers"
Just as a helpful point of order, the PCC doesn't (and can't anyway) fine newspapers because it reckons media barons would treat penalties for inaccuracies as business expenses; it would ruin smaller newspapers; the libel courts are there for making good substantial damage.
C.
New commentards, repeat offenders, people who have had comments rejected, and people commenting on stories that are not auto-moderated will sit in a queue awaiting moderation.
That may take time to clear, especially over a weekend. Trust me, we try to barrel through comments as quickly as possible. If a comment is lingering then it's probably been passed into a second queue for bosses to approve or most likely reject for being too bonkers, libelly or otherwise unsafe.
Myself and my colleague Jude have hand moderated nearly 230,000 messages in the past couple of years.
If you're noticing your comments take time to appear, you're in one of the above four categories.
C.
"I'd be interested if you had an update on this article"
I'm not sure there's much more to add, honestly. As much as I love a media conspiracy theory, sadly there's no great collusion here. An article, one of the hundreds we publish a month, riled some readers. It happens.
"Item 2 was some sort of 'anti-radiation' cover for a mobile phone ... If you'd taken the piss out of it, you might have got away with it. "
Er, we did: we wrote 'Weird science? Snake oil modelling? Take your pick as it’s going to be hard for a user to determine...'
"The 'stocking-filler' bit was badly judged"
I'm assured it was tongue-in-cheek. I certainly read it that way after publication.
"Keep up the good work."
Thanks.
C.
"No it hasn't. At least if the story at The Reg linked to is to be believed."
TalkTalk does active filtering; other ISPs have been pressured to bundle filtering with new connections.
"Eh?"
Largely resisted by ISPs and parents. I've had another stab at that par to spell everything out for you.
C.
"Just how many readers do you think have 60 grand to throw at a 'test lab' that don't already know how to do the same thing cheaper and better?"
Just a couple of things. In case the headline didn't make it obvious enough, this is a bonkers setup: it's obviously an everything-including-the-kitchen-sink "dream rig", as the sub-headline states. Also, you don't have to buy the whole lot; the headline figure is tongue-in-cheek.
We write technical stuff and people complain that's it boring; we write fun stuff and people call it fluff. You can't please all of the people all of the time.
C.
Point taken. It could be that Dart is running 130% faster but the target is twice that. Or it could be 30% faster but the target is 100%. We'll go back to the source to check this one.
PS: On busy days thousands of comments are posted; we never get the chance to read them all so problems like this can go unnoticed. If you hit the corrections button on the article, we'll be able to fix problems immediately :-)
C.
We recently wrote about Virgin Media and the ASA here:
Virgin Media's 'bye-bye to buffering' ad nuked by watchdog - AGAIN
Virgin Media spanked for 'we've already cabled up your house' mailshot
C.
"If it's another variable or saved register contents, then the previous contents will be lost, and/or some unpredictable behaviour might happen when the variable is used"
Yes, but: doesn't matter, got EIP. You've got control of execution and your own code in memory: spawn a new process to do evil things and watch the victim burn. In a nutshell. It's not quite that trivial. Ideally, you don't want the attacked process to crash (especially if targeting an OS kernel) but it's not the end of the world. For you, anyway.
But, anyone weaponising this particular flaw will need to jump through the usual hoops of buffer overflow exploitation. Your payload may well be in a non-executable memory area so the processor will fault if it and the OS support NX, for example. You'll probably blow away the stack cookie too, if it's there - it's not in this program, though.
And the browser or corporate web proxy may reject or otherwise screw up a stupidly long URL so you can't be too loose with your payload.
However, the goal isn't to pwn everyone using Foxit, just enough of those using the PDF plugin on susceptible systems to make it worthwhile.
See others who have pasted the smashing the stack paper; you guys beat me to it.
C.
It's a rather neat and tidy bug, if you look at the code in the disclosure.
mov al,[esi+ebp]
cmp al,'%'
jz handle_url_escape_code
mov ecx,[esp+1Ch]
mov [ebx+ecx],al
jmp continue_loop
So.. keep looping, writing whatever's in the URL string (pointed to by esi+ebp, copied into al) into the buffer at ebx+ecx one byte at a time. continue_loop increments esi and ebx.
I've only briefly glanced at the rest of the code, but it does appear to do some checking (multiple uses of repne scasb) to make sure it doesn't run past the end of the URL string - but not the buffer boundary.
C.
Actually, it's about old TVs needing an RF analogue signal and modern digital boxes offering only Scart or better. If your cheapo Freeview has an RF out it's highly likely it's just a passthrough and thus the signal fed into your B&W telly will be useless.
I've fixed the par to make it clear what "special" means in this case.
C.
"the answers supplied by the commenting community"
Well, that's half the point of enabling comments on Martin's storage blog. His Storagebod pieces are supposed to generate discussion on top of our usual storage coverage. The comments aren't just there to let off steam at work by throwing rotten tomatoes at writers :-)
C.
"I think maybe the Microsoft/iPad story I thought was old news"
The iPad story emerged over the weekend. Like quite a few people, we quite rightly thought it was another web hoax so it took a working day to confirm.
"so didn't scroll down past there"
Tut tut :)
"Still a little thin on the ground"
CES hasn't actually opened yet.
"the new range of LG fridge freezers ... you are going to cover those aren't you?"
Uh *looks off stage for a clue*
C.
"Libel doesn't cover statements of opinion. So going on Yelp and posting "Builder ABC is shite" wouldn't be covered under libel"
In the UK you can be sued for defamation for an opinion if it is not completely backed by fact: for the fair comment defence to work, you need to have prove there is truth to support your view. So describing a builder as shoddy, incompetent, lazy, etc is unsafe unless you have hard evidence.
C.
See Linus' email for the full technical reasons why: the ioctl was returning a code invalid for the operaton requested. Any app that properly checked its syscall error codes would be confused. The error code returned to pulseaudio was specific to paths, wheas ioctls operate on open files.
C.
"I really don't want to be pedantic but this is just odd."
OK: apologies if it's not clear (that'll be my fault) but the movethecable.org people *contacted* the FCO to ask the dept to consider following the ITU resolution on connecting up islands. The FCO fired back the response we published: the office won't help, it wouldn't have to help and in terms of cash, it definitely isn't helping. If that's not a plea sunk, then I'm at a loss.
As for the DfID route, we've added a bootnote to say that all is not necessarily lost - there may be funding forthcoming; in fact, anyone with a spare 10m quid could chip in. But the FCO route - which the cable campaigners turned to for help - is closed. Sunk. Snubbed.
Sorry to put it in such terms when we can see people really do want the link put in and are fighting the good fight.
C.
